LINGUIST List 5.1182

Wed 26 Oct 1994

Qs: ESL, French ling, Translationese, Turkish, Syntax

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Alan Munn, Query: ESL corpora available?
2. MEL SCULLEN, French Ling Programs??
3. Jo Terje Ydstie, translationese
4. JIANHUA BAI, Turkish Summer Program
5. Marilyn Silva, native speaker intuitions

I'm teaching a course in second language acquisition and am wondering
if there are any sources of ESL students' written and or spoken
production at various levels and from various L1s. I would be
interested in either published or electronic versions.

Thanks

Alan Munn

 --
Alan Munn <amunnshowme.missouri.edu>
Dept. of English, University of Missouri, Columbia MO 65211

We are trying to compile a list of graduate (PhD-producing) programs in
French Linguistics in the US, Canada and abroad. Any information that you
could send would be appreciated. We are definitely interested in finding out
which institutions offer such programs and if possible getting the name of a
contact person and an address. If there is interest, I will post a summary
of the programs to the List.

Merci d'avance,
Mel Scullen
Dept of Classical & Modern Languages
University of Louisville

Could anyone please advise me on material dealing with translationese, i.e.
describing/analyzing/criticizing the translation product, preferably with
regard to translation into the translator's native language. Material to be
used in connection with a research project on how/why translation products
deviate from texts originally produced in the translation target language.
Would also appreciate references to Norwegian/English contrastive material.

Can anyone recommend a summer intensive
program in Turkish? Your information is
greatly appreciated. Please respond to

baikenyon.edu

What is the current status of "native speaker intuitions" in
linguistics? I ask this question because appealing to such
intuitions in the analysis or interpretation of strings in a
language poses some interesting difficulties, particularly
to those of us who teach courses in syntax.

I teach, among other things, a course entitled "Modern English
Grammar", which treats English syntax in nonformal, surface
structure terms, and which is aimed primarily at nonlinguists.
I have found that students often challenge what I think of as
ordinary interpretations in unexpected ways. A case in point:
Yesterday, during my lecture illustrating that infinitive clauses
could serve as objects in ditransitive constructions by using the
sentence "John asked Mary to leave," one student claimed that the
sentence was ambiguous between the reading where Mary would do
the leaving (the reading I get) and that in which John would do the
leaving. I found this second reading puzzling, and I found too that
when questioned, other students who initially did not see ambiguity
and had intuitions similar to mine were not exactly sure whether the
sentence was ambiguous or not. The student who posed the challenge
(though indeed, even if she were correct, the alternate reading would
not change the surface bracketing one bit) claimed she got this
reading by thinking something like "John asked to leave," which
clearly means that John would leave, and WHO he asked was Mary.
Suddenly, her interpretation didn't seem so peculiar in that light.
I then thought of a scenario in which John and Mary arrived at a
destination together, and John wanted to leave, so he said to Mary,
"Whaddya say we leave?" Then someone recounting the incident later
might report, "John asked Mary to leave." Or would one?

If this matter were not confusing enough, I had an interesting question
from a student in another section--and an excellent one at that (both
of these students are good students)--who wondered about "His tongue
felt thick," a sentence I culled from a novel and put on a quiz. The
answer I expected, and indeed got, from the student was that _felt_
is here used as a copular verb, and that _thick_ is a complement. But,
he said, he saw another possibility for _felt_: It COULD be intransitive.
Clearly there are transitive uses of _feel_ (e.g. "She could feel the
softness of the fur"), but intransitive ones? I asked him whether he
was comfortable with strings such as "*His tongue felt." He said he
was! Perhaps he was tacitly assuming that the entire predicate phrase
_felt thick_ was the verb and as such would have a clearly intransitive cast.
Or perhaps he was unconsciously thinking of possibilities such as "She
felt for the light switch and couldn't find it," in which the object is not
a direct object but a prepositional one.

How do we account for native speaker intuitions when they can diverge
so radically from speaker to speaker? And perhaps more importantly,
how do we teach syntax to native speakers when we cannot rely on
their having intuitions similar to our own? Can we chalk up such
commonplace difficulties as overinterpretation on the part of our
students? How do we handle these issues, if at all? Do we need to
scrap the notion of native intuitions altogether? (I don't really
like this last one!)

Please reply to me directly, and given sufficient interest, I will
post a summary to the List.
Thanks.

Marilyn Silva
msilvas1.csuhayward.edu